1 Gower’s translation offers a bonus lumber earlier that is almost as inspiring:
Hemm’d round with learning’s musty scrolls,
Her ponderous volumes, dusty rolls,
Which to the ceiling’s vault arise,
Above the reach of studious eyes,
Where revelling worms peruse the store
Of wisdom’s antiquated lore,—
With glasses, tools of alchemy,
Cases and bottles, whole and crack’d,
Hereditary lumber, pack’d.
This is the world, the world, for me!
2 Not every passage quoted herein will actually contain the word; that would be obsessive.
3 Cf. Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae, 1565.
4 Both Locke’s and Bunyan’s dark rooms may owe something to a sermon by John Donne delivered on Christmas Day, 1624: “God does not furnish a roome, and leave it darke; he sets up lights in it; his first care was, that his benefits should be seene; he made light first, and then creatures, to be seene by that light.…”
5 Juvenile wood is wood near the pith of the tree; it has a “larger longitudinal hygrocoefficient of expansion than mature wood,” writes Larson, who is concerned that the expansion-habits of juvenile wood will lead to “an increase in the frequency and severity in spatial deformation of wood subjected to hygrothermal gradients.”
6 Samuel Johnson, in his “Life of Swift,” described the Athenian Society as “a knot of obscure men.” They were Samuel Wesley (whom we will meet again later), Daniel Defoe, and the publisher John Dunton, among others; they published Swift’s flattering “Ode” in their Athenian Gazette, vol. 5, supplement, 1692. Dunton wrote that Swift’s “Ode” was “an ingenious poem” (See John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Colin Clair, p. 122), but Pat Rogers (Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, p. 604) reports that Joseph Horrell’s harsh verdict — that this is Swift’s “worst poem by odds”—is “shared by many critics.”
7 There is no lumber in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The word resurfaces in Swift’s “The Progress of Poetry,” written c. 1719 but not published until the Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1728), which was edited by Pope: “To raise the lumber from the earth.” Pat Rogers subjoins a note to this line: “lumber one of Pope’s favourite terms of opprobrium.”
8 See the WELL’s “Info” Conference (“A Conference About Communication Systems, Communities, and Tools for the Information Age”), Topic 641 (“Internet Encyclopedia”), Response 15 (Oct. 26, 1993): “Your hyperencyclopedia software (or ‘siftware’) would direct you toward a basic article on spiders, analogous to the FAQ files placed in many newsgroups.” The WELL is an electronic conferencing system: (415) 332–8410; http://www.well.com.
9 Inspired by Kent Hieatt’s numerical analysis of Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” (Short Time’s Endless Monument, 1960), a sophomore in college, in 1975, wrote a paper on the numerical structure of Book I of The Faery Queen, in which he pointed out that the word seven appears for the first time in the poem on line seven, stanza 17, Canto vii of Spenser’s poem (“For seven great heads out of his body grew”), and appears in precisely the same context (a mention of the seven-headed beast that carries the Whore of Babylon) as surrounds the word seven in Revelations chapter 17, verse 7. Without Osgood’s concordance to Spenser (1915) and several concordances to the Bible open before him, the student would never have noticed this further tiny instance of Spenserian numerology. And it was so incredibly easy, too, once I (for it was I) had decided what to look up: “Index-learning,” Pope himself pointed out, reworking some earlier snideries of Charles Boyle and Dean Swift,
turns no student pale,
Yet holds the Eel of science by the Tail.
10 Soberingly, the editors of the concordance write that “this optical scanning proved to be the phase of the project that caused the most problems and it seemed for a time that we had traded a tedious but straightforward task [i.e., manual text-entry] for an exasperatingly complicated one.… But these difficulties were related to the fact that the technique of direct optical scanning, the claims of computer and data processing houses to the contrary, is still in the developmental stage. Our experience with this method makes us feel that for most purposes literary scholars had best regard it as in the realm of the possible as contrasted with the practical.”
11 Reproduced in Lectures on Literature, p. 137.
12 There is an ode to Walter Scott in there, by one Horatio Smith, that mentions the “minstrel’s lay” and “lordly Marmion,” and there is even the text of an entire anthology that Scott edited, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders. There are 227 poems by William Bell Scott, a painter in the circle of Rossetti. But Sir Walter’s own poetry, which, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in a review of the Lay in 1805, “has manifested a degree of genius which cannot be overlooked,” was overlooked.
13 It was set to music several times and in song form sold tens of thousands of copies.
14 “During almost his whole literary career he had been a sparing but an exquisite writer of a peculiar kind of verse, half serious half comic, which is scarcely inferior in excellence to his best prose,” says George Saintsbury, in A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature. I couldn’t find any lumber in Thackeray’s poems, but I did find a good poem about a garret, called “The Garret.” Here are two middle stanzas:
Yes; ’tis a garret — let him know’t who will—
There was my bed — full hard it was and small;
My table there — and I decipher still
Half a lame couplet charcoaled on the wall.
Ye joys, that Time hath swept with him away,
Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;
For you I pawned my watch how many a day,
In the brave days when I was twenty-one.
And see my little Jessy, first of all;
She comes with pouting lips and sparkling eyes:
Behold, how roguishly she pins her shawl